Re: Icon love

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

>On Fri, 2002-01-18 at 19:47, jacob berkman wrote:
>
>    it would be nice if there were Go icons to complement Stop.
>
>Hmm. Good idea. But this time I am wise in advance:
>
>    Does anyone know of a country that uses a red standing guy in a
>    traffic light to indicate "GO!" and a walking green guy to indicate
>    "Stop!"? As we have learned, you never know... :o)

Sigh....

well I understand that in some cultures it's offensive to use 
representations of humans in icons in the first place ;-)

so probably there isn't a truly universal answer...


Much more seriously, it's a bad idea to use red and green to distinguish 
these since in that case about 2% of the male user population will be 
unable to tell them apart... (red/green color blindness, actually quite 
common).  The standing/walking metaphor is probably OK except that the 
icon might have to be harge-ish in order to distinguish the figure.

So the stoplight metaphor is probably not good for "go", the octagon is 
recognized in a number of cultures (but not all) as a "stop sign", even 
if it's not red.

-Bill

>If not, that would be an idea worth trying for a go icon.
>
>Tig
>
>    
>    
>    
>    
>Tuomas Kuosmanen  ::  Art Director 
>::  Ximian, Inc.
>tigert ximian com  :: 
>www.ximian.com
>

------
Bill Haneman x19279
Gnome Accessibility / Batik SVG Toolkit
Sun Microsystems Ireland